emotional party

         There’s an improv game called Emotional Party. It’s played with a bunch of people all in the same room. One person chooses an emotion that they physically display. It could be sadness and I could cry. It could be happiness and I could hug myself, smile, and skip. It could be anger and I could stomp. It could be jealousy and I could go from person to person turning my back. It could be shyness and I could walk around looking down. Whatever the emotion is everyone has to take it on. So if I am sad, then everyone is sad. If I am happy, then everyone is happy. If I am mad then everyone is mad.

Imagine a world in which you can close your eyes and travel to a world where everyone is feeling what you are feeling? A world of anguish, despair, neutrality, ecstatic love, immense fear. Imagine if, just by closing your eyes, everyone that you loved could come with you and be enveloped by whatever emotion you were being consumed by. How would this feel? Comforting? Alienating? Constraining? Self-indulgent?

Based on the idea that a lot of times society expects us and anticipates us feeling a certain way and we generally accept that they are right. We should feel sad at a funeral, happy at the end of a Disney movie. There is a general lack of acceptance of radical emotions or expressions that do not fit this mold. We just label people crazy when their emotions are not predictable or mold-fitting. There is no place for them in society. A society of emotional obedience has led to a numb nation.  

The human survival instinct is often at odds with the pervasive longing for love, camaraderie, community, and affection. We aspire to live and to live well. But we also long to live happily with people who understand us, who elevate our egos, and carve us into something rather than nothing. I am only me because of you. You breath life into me, shape my personality. As it pertains to me, what you laugh at, what you smile at, what you hate, what you love, what annoys you, what pleases you; these all hold baring on how I act, how I think, how I imagine, and what I dream. I am you and you are me and there is a point at which, having spent so much time together, we can say that we are one consciousness. When our survival is at stake, would we risk surviving and living alone, or would we rather die in the company of others? I may be the greatest, strongest, fastest out there, but I am only made known in the presence of others. They make an audience out of millions, they make me out to be the strongest, fastest, smartest, wildest. And if there is someone out there living in obscurity who is stonger, faster, smarter, wilder than I, but who’s presence is not made known, than what is the point? Why strive to be better, stronger, or faster if not in the eye of the public? We wish to survive, and when we know we can, we wish to survive and be happy. When we are happy, we wish to be as happy as the happiest man and then some. In striving to get happier and happier, we become bitter, manipulative, raging in our pursuits of the happiest happiness of all happinesses. And then we become sad and make ourselves sick because some of the hardest, healthiest decisions to make can only be made by someone who is not at odds with themselves and others. And then we wish only to survive, because we feel bad and are sad. And once we get better and realize that we are surviving, we long to be happy; as happy as the happiest man……….